Minority Report

Whodunnit?

Baseball bats? Ha!

Minority Report's vision of a near-future world, with its animated
cereal boxes, personalised advertisements beamed straight to the
brain, and Big Brother-style retinal scan citizen control system,
is one of the most ornate and consistently amazing sci-fi worlds
delivered in recent cinematic history, and having bought the rights
to the inevitable spin-off game, Activision will be hoping that
developers Treyarch can accurately recreate the world for another
adventure on PS2, Cube and Xbox.

Unsurprisingly, Treyarch has opted for the third person action
genre in a similar vein to its recent Spider-Man offering. The
player is PreCrime Officer John Anderton, journeying through 15
levels set to the tune of an alternate storyline with the usual
conspiratorial overtones. It's not yet clear if John will be
fighting for the good or to clear his name again, but the game is
almost certainly set prior to the film (for reasons which will be
obvious to those who have seen it). Treyarch will be building
environments like the PreCrime HQ and Mall City from the film,
occupied by human and robot enemies, with hand-to-hand combat the
foundation of the game's action.

Various tools including riot shotguns and electro-pulse grenades
will be amongst the weapons at Anderton's disposal, along with our
own favourites, the brilliantly realised vortex rifle - with the
ability to deliver an air punch, rather like Unreal Tournament's
melee weapon - and the incapacitating Sick Stick. Anderton will
also have a PDA from which to retrieve information and hints should
the player run out of ideas, and of course Jet Packs will
presumably play a significant role.

There is no Minority Report

One imagines that Treyarch's critics will be watching this one with
a sense of foreboding. Certainly, the aerial manoeuvring of the Jet
Pack, hand-to-hand combat and a huge, rolling neon cityscape will
all be familiar to those fresh out of Spidey's caper. However,
Treyarch's promise of multiple endings, an "Intuitive Clue System"
to help identify objects which unlock scripted events, and the
potential highlight of high-speed chases in the PreCrime Hovership,
Mag-lev cars and Lexus vehicles, should be more than enough to
convince even the most stubborn of naysayers to wait and see.